592: Ed Batista - How To Give Useful Feedback, What Great Leaders Do, and Why We All Need An Executive Coach
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Read our book, The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/3XxHi7p Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com This episode is supported by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing company dedicated to empowering people. Please CLICK HERE for premier staffing and talent. Notes: • Commonalities of excellent coaches: • Not defensive • Respond well to feedback • Ability to learn • "Leadership can't be taught but it can be learned." • Coaching is not therapy, but it can be therapy-adjacent. • It's not telling people what to do and it's not just asking questions. It's a combination of all of them. • There is ample research on the benefits of writing. It clarifies your thinking. • The questions to ask someone who might need an executive coach: • Why do you want a coach? • Why now? • What do you hope to get out of it? • What do great leaders do? • First, do no harm. • Walk the talk. • Be an embodiment of the culture. • Have high standards • Take risks • Coach people up • Train people • "Coaching is accomplishment through others." • "Feedback is not a gift." • Feedback is data. Signal and noise. • Signal - Important and good. • Noise - Byproduct of someone's distorted lens. • "Praise, Criticism, Praise (PCP) is terrible." Don't give the compliment sandwich. It's disingenuous. • How leaders best overcome adversity – The most critical skill is "adaptive capacity..." It's composed of two primary qualities: the ability to grasp context, and hardiness. • Coaching - Asking evocative questions, ensuring the other person feels heard, and actively conveying empathy remain the foundations of coaching. • Connect: Establish and renew the interpersonal connection, followed by an open-ended question. • Reflect: Having elicited a response, reflect back the essence of the other person's comments. • Direct: Focus their attention on a particular aspect of their response that invites further exploration. • Support and Challenge - A client once said, "It feels like you're always in my corner, but you never hesitate to challenge me." • Master the Playbook, Throw it Away - Coaching involves a continuous and cyclical process of learning, unlearning, and relearning. • Power Dynamics - The longer I coach, the more I appreciate and value the work of Jeff Pfeffer, a leading scholar on power. philosopher Ernest Becker: "If you are wrong about power, you don't get a chance to be right about anything else." • "Meaningful coaching is always an emotionally intimate experience, no matter what's being discussed. In part this is a function of the context: two people talking directly to each other with no distractions... Intimacy in a coaching relationship also results from a willingness to 'make the private public'--to share with another person the thoughts and feelings that we usually keep to ourselves... And yet an essential factor that makes such intimacy possible is a clear set of boundaries defining the relationship, which creates an inevitable and necessary sense of distance..."